Mountain Yoga Bozeman Virginia

Of course there's a lot to like about Bozeman – a Western university town in a scenic valley rimmed by mountains, near ski slopes and fishable rivers. We have a nice downtown, a small airport that's surprisingly well-connected, few traffic jams, and tech entrepreneurs mixing with conservationists and hipsters - and a few actual cowboys.

On top of that, our homegrown entertainment includes a group of local women who create edgy comedy routines – check Broad Comedy on YouTube, singing "I Didn't F*ck It Up" or imitating inner-city rappers in "Soccer Mom Ho." You can even buy a Bozeman T-shirt letting the world know that you're a supporter of our very own Green Coalition of Gay Loggers for Jesus.

But any town has drawbacks, whether we're talking Paradise, Utah, or Paradise, Calif., or Paradise, Nev., or the various versions of San Francisco and Aspen and so on. That's why many local governments have adopted a new "Code of the West" officially warning any paradise-seeking immigrants of the problems they'll encounter when they move in, such as – egads! – rough roads, dangerous wildfires and the aroma of cattle.

The hyped-up Top 10 lists don't admit the drawbacks of my town. They just encourage paradise-seekers to move in – and thousands of people have apparently followed the advice by moving to Bozeman since I got here.

So, tongue in cheek, here's my rebellion against the hype: The Top 10 Reasons Not To Move To Bozeman.

(1) Begin with the town's name – it's lame. John M. Bozeman was a grandiose hustler who helped establish the town in 1864, while he was promoting the "Bozeman Trail, " a dangerous shortcut for white settlers traveling through Wyoming and Idaho to Montana gold camps. John M. Bozeman hoped that his new town would "swallow up all the tenderfeet ... from the east, with their golden fleeces to be taken care of, " one immigrant reported. But the whole Bozeman Trail quickly became a fiasco, as tribes including the Lakota Sioux, the Northern Cheyenne and the Northern Arapaho resisted the intrusion on their turf; within only four years or so, Native warriors wiped out 81 U.S. Army soldiers in the infamous Fetterman massacre and shut down the trail for good. As for John M. Bozeman himself, he had abandoned his wife and three young daughters in Georgia when he headed west to seek his fortune – setting the pattern for all the schemers and lone wolves who've come to this town since then.

John M. Bozeman had some good qualities (handsome, muscular, a crack shot). But fundamentally he was "a reckless man (who) never could see danger anywhere, " according to one of his own friends back in the 1860s. He dressed like a dandy, in "the black beaver-cloth cutaway coat and striped dress trousers favored by gamblers, " according to historians and friends, and made his living as "a speculator" who "farmed a bit, got in a few fights, gambled a lot, dreamed up business schemes, and was out of town for long periods of time."